an awareness campaign to stop a phenomenon which costs more than a billion euros in damage

There are more and more online deceptions to defraud bank card users, and shadowy actors are inventing more and more elaborate schemes. An awareness campaign has been open for several days. Organized by the government, telephone operators and bankers, it aims to warn everyone not to fall into the traps set, with a recommendation in the form of a slogan: “Never give out your data”.

Scams are more widespread than we think, and scammers are fond of the simplest, very mundane methods that do not attract our attention. Too often, we ourselves offer scammers the means to trap us. To recover the victim’s data, the fraudster will pretend to be their banker, their delivery person, their online merchant, to resolve a problem or supposedly validate transactions. Some customers or users give their codes very easily, and in good faith, by email or text message. This vein is used more and more since it thwarts the most advanced security systems. This is why the prevention campaign is based in particular on this concrete example: “Your bank advisor will never ask you for your usernames and passwords by phone or text message, they don’t need them”. If this is the case, you should hang up quickly.

Recently guest of franceinfo, the general director of the French Banking Federation, Maya Atig, gave this figure: the total amount of payment fraud reached in 2022, the last reference year, 1.2 billion euros. This is why this awareness campaign is supported in particular by bankers for whom the financial stakes are important. Indeed, to avoid having to reimburse the embezzled amounts, banks are obliged to prove that the negligence comes from the client and not from its services. A real administrative and legal headache.